In 1958, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority established a fifteen-minute daily Persian-language program targeting Iranian listeners, restarting segments that had begun almost a decade earlier. These broadcasts were written and produced by recent Iranian Jewish immigrants to the country, who brought press and activism experience and expertise from their country of origin. The purpose of these broadcasts was to highlight Israel’s economic and technological achievements, convey its foreign policy perspectives, and strengthen elite connections with Iran. In the process, such broadcasts also became the focal point for an increasingly internationalizing Iranian population, a fact that remained true up to and beyond the country’s 1978–79 revolution. Studies of radio in Israel have noted the medium’s function in both domestic constructions of the new state’s identity and culture as well as public diplomacy facing its enemies and allies. This article shows that Persian-language radio broadcasts served both these purposes, as well as positing a further function in their use as a point of transnational connectivity, beyond relations with Israel alone. In so doing, this article points to the power of listeners in structuring their own communities, even in response to state-centric media campaigns.

The article takes an in-depth look at the experiences Australia and Canada have had dealing with issues related to the funding and financial regulation of the third or ‘private, non-profit’ sector of broadcasting. Through the analysis of these experiences, recommendations are extracted aimed at providing policy makers and stakeholders from other jurisdictions guidance regarding how to deal with these issues.

Professional statements suggest that psychiatrists engage in media work to supply a general audience with medical knowledge informed by relevant professional expertise. However, media work may be motivated by interests other than disinterested service to the well-being of the public, such as fame, money and a platform for one's wider views. The role of media psychiatrist is also crucially shaped by the unpredictable needs of a complex media ecology and marketplace. Furthermore, the properties of the media, and different forms within them, bring implicit meanings such as the wider authorisation of therapeutic self-reflection or the promotion of para-social intimacy. Finally, the media psychiatrist may function as an entrepreneur, converting the currency of celebrity into new forms of cultural, social and political capital. Professional guidelines for media work should be updated in light of such observations.

This article argues that technicians’ working lives and workplaces are crucial to conceptualizing the inequalities that characterized the ‘wireless world’ of radio broadcasting during a period of demands for a new information order. Taking Uganda’s national broadcaster and the files it has preserved as a focus, I follow calls to move beyond the exceptionalism of 1970s Uganda to locate it in global histories of technology and work. Like many broadcasters in decolonizing countries, Radio Uganda struggled to secure space on the electromagnetic spectrum, challenge neo-colonial information monopolies, balance its internationalist ambitions with its reliance on foreign equipment and training agreements, and fill vacancies. In the same years, its technicians responded to hundreds of reception reports sent by amateur distant listeners – most from Western Europe. The labour of responding to these reports and their cosmopolitan pronouncements represents a hitherto unexplored window onto the exchanges that underscored the globalization of radio technology and its limits in the 1970s.

American broadcasting, unique among media industries, relied on sponsors and their ad agencies for program content from the 1920s through the 1950s. Some sponsors broadcast educational or culturally uplifting programs to burnish their corporate images. By the mid-1960s, however, commercial broadcasting had transformed, and advertisers could only buy interstitial minutes for interrupting commercials, during which they wooed cynical consumers with entertaining soft-sell appeals. The midcentury shifts in institutional power in US broadcasting among corporate sponsors, advertising agencies, and radio/television networks reflected a fundamental shift in beliefs about how to use broadcasting as an advertising medium.

A large and sparse random graph with independent exponentially distributed link weights can be used to model the propagation of messages or diseases in a network with an unknown connectivity structure. In this article we study an extended setting where, in addition, the nodes of the graph are equipped with nonnegative random weights which are used to model the effect of boundary delays across paths in the network. Our main results provide approximative formulas for typical first passage times, typical flooding times, and maximum flooding times in the extended setting, over a time scale logarithmic with respect to the network size.

This article examines the launch of the Tribuna elettorale and Tribuna politica programmes on Italian television (1960–1961), seen in the context of the country's broadcasting history and the changes in the political spectrum and governing alliances at that time. The changing face of political communications and leader–viewer relations may be the most interesting side to the Tribune, but also the most heavily studied. This article chooses instead to reconstruct the steps and reasons that led prime minister Fanfani in the autumn of 1960 to force through his decision to give all political parties airspace for political propaganda. The article argues that the Tribune programmes were only partly innovatory, a kind of ‘revolution that never was’. They were a first step towards democratising the public broadcasting corporation, but maintained firm links with the past and above all sought to legitimiste ‘government television’, as well as delaying structural reform of the medium in the face of mounting pressure on many sides. For the Christian Democrat (DC) and the RAI management, the Tribune programmes were a clever compromise solution, giving in terms of pluralism of information what they were not prepared to concede in terms of pluralism of management.

Food advertisements on mainstream television have received less research attention than those on children's television. Little is known about how television food advertisements vary internationally or if there have been changes over recent years. We describe food-related television advertisements and the nutrient content of foods advertised during prime-time television in Ontario, Canada and the UK in 1991 and 2006. Information on what advertisements were broadcast were obtained from video recordings and audience research bureaux. Data on nutrient content of foods advertised were obtained from manufacturers and standard food tables. The proportion of advertisements that were food related decreased between 1991 and 2006 in both countries. The frequency of food-related advertisements was relatively constant in Canada but decreased between 1991 and 2006 in the UK. In 1991, advertisements for beverages and meals predominated in both countries. By 2006, food-related advertisements in Canada were dominated by meals and restaurants. In the UK advisements for food stores and beverages predominated. The ‘TV diet’ in Canada in 1991 was relatively high in fat, high in alcohol and low in fibre, compared to current recommendations. By 2006, this had changed to high in fat and sodium and low in fibre. The ‘TV diet’ in the UK in 1991 was high in fat, sodium, sugar and alcohol and low in fibre compared to current recommendations. By 2006, the UK ‘TV diet’ was high in sodium, sugar and alcohol and low in fibre. Foods advertised on ‘prime-time’ television do not reflect a healthful diet.

In this paper, we analyse a model of a regular tree loss network that supports two types of calls: unicast calls that require unit capacity on a single link, and multicast calls that require unit capacity on every link emanating from a node. We study the behaviour of the distribution of calls in the core of a large network that has uniform unicast and multicast arrival rates. At sufficiently high multicast call arrival rates the network exhibits a ‘phase transition’, leading to unfairness due to spatial variation in the multicast blocking probabilities. We study the dependence of the phase transition on unicast arrival rates, the coordination number of the network, and the parity of the capacity of edges in the network. Numerical results suggest that the nature of phase transitions is qualitatively different when there are odd and even capacities on the links. These phenomena are seen to persist even with the introduction of nonuniform arrival rates and multihop multicast calls into the network. Finally, we also show the inadequacy of approximations such as the Erlang fixed-point approximations when multicasting is present.